Tuesday, 27 January 2009

Furtive glances through the apple garden.

Life always presents challenges, which are not necessarily difficulties: for a difficulty is something you must overcome or admit defeat, a challenge is a choice you decide to make.

Sometimes, on rare, and therefore cherished occasions, you can meet someone who represents a world to you. A world of possibilities, change, difference; the quality of newness. Keeping this newness a perpetual and continual reality is the challenge of making any long term relationship work. Therefore, it requires that each half continues in its own growth, individually and together.

Life is rarely straightforward - or at least certainly not in my case - and the obvious, perhaps rational appraisal of things is not always the case.

Nowhere is this more true than in the weaving and turnings of matters of the heart.

Yet if you were to meet someone who was simply the "perfect" match, then it would probably be the nullification of yourself. For, the person who could be best for you isn't necessarily the one you agree with, or share the same intellectual, political, social, religious, or even, spiritual viewpoint. If there was no difference, no conflict in any dimension, you would end up with a harmonious blandness. Conflict isn't always destruction, and harmony isn't always creation. Sometimes creation arises from conflict: much as new shoots reach up after a forest fire clears away the established fauna. Destruction and creation exist in a cyclical and coterminous relationship.

Rather, life is in the contrasts. Love is in the contrasts. The East understood this best where they explicated this in terms of the individuation and greater harmony of Yin-Yang and Tao. Love could be viewed as a process towards a higher synthesis - from the thesis and antithesis.

Analysis aside, Freyja must indeed be smiling on me at the moment, as someone has crossed into my path who has made me stop. And notice.

I hesitate to speculate on possibilities, and indeed command myself to be empty, as in receptive: to cease to try, and see what becomes. If she should like me for who I am, then what will be, will be. Whether that be something, or nothing at all.

"Heaven and Earth go on forever. Why?Because they have no sense of self.

The Wise advance,by holding back.

They lose themselves, and find the Whole.

Fulfilment comes from selflessness."

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (Timothy Freke trans.).

I could attempt to describe the enormous variety of qualities that make her so attractive, but sometimes what is finest is what is most simple and perhaps most obvious.

She radiates a tremendous warmth of spirit, with an incredible smile and a joyful personality that exudes compassion and kindness.

When I am lucky enough to be around her, not only do I feel positively uplifted, but I feel that she draws out of me the qualities that can make me a better man, a better me. Such an emotional reaction sometimes makes it difficult for me to communicate adequately with her.

I can only hope that I share in the same fashion whatever I have to give to her.

There does seem to be an incredible instinctual energy between us. I have made errors in judgement before, but I sense that this time it isn't purely just "platonic" on her part, and that I am reading the correct metaphorical page (or even book!). I hope so.

I have no idea as to how to proceed, but all I can do is to tentatively reach out and see whether she wishes to reciprocate in fashion.

She may possibly even be reading this... and if so, will probably know who she is.

How many words in life we speak, yet with so few do we actually dare to say what we truly mean and hope! Instead we circumscribe around the matter, and hope that what is left not communicated is silently understood.

Still, I feel one must always be a warrior with the heart, and that no matter how badly broken it has been before, on however many occasions, one must always be prepared to risk it anew lest the opportunity forever passes and one is only left with greater burden to bear. The greatest prizes always come with the greatest risks.

Labels are labels: sometimes the real truth is that beyond the labels you share a commonality of principles. The challenge of pluralism in our modern era is to find those common principles.

So, sometimes, the person for you, and the person for them, isn't the obvious one.

Challenge yourself, live, and grow.

Perhaps with the onset of spring, I feel a sense of a renewal of being, as I feel great psychical shifts and undercurrents that have been slowly forming over the last two years starting to take shape.

What is success? What is achievement? In the Western world, it is often equated with wealth. With material security. A car. A home. A lucrative job. A continual sense of completing goals. Comfort. Holidays.

Yet what about the qualities that cannot be measured? Does the rich stockbroker constantly on the go really know him or herself? Or is their identity merely a constructed and projected one through all his/her external achievements?

Perhaps they might.

But perhaps they don't.

I have come to realise that the last couple of years have been years of achievement for me, but not on anything that is either quantifiable, measurable, or even easily demonstrable. But I know it.

The logical corollary of this, is that this probably will, it would be nice to think, at some subsequent point in the future, find expression in something that is "externally" recognisable. But such an eventuality is not ultimately critical; it is merely a satisfying addition.

5 comments:

"If there was no difference, no conflict in any dimension, you would end up with a harmonious blandness. Conflict isn't always destruction, and harmony isn't always creation. Sometimes creation arises from conflict: much as new shoots reach up after a forest fire clears away the established fauna. Destruction and creation exist in a cyclical and coterminous relationship"

LOL!

Are you talking from actual experience or from a philosophical hypothetical standpoint here ?

I think that there are MANY couples who do find growth, mental and emotional expansion through harmonious interaction! That doesn't mean argument free but it does mean that they can suddenly decide to travel the world, buy a new house, got for a walk or whatever, agree about it and revel in it because ultimately they are doing something they want to do for themselves but sharing the valuable experience with someone else, amazing!

I haven't got it but I know it exists and it's amazing! Hunt for it matey!

I'm completely hooked! You have summed up every (well, nearly every) thought swirling through my mind in the last, oh ok, so my whole recountable life. I will come back to ponder on these ideas and leave a more dignified comment(s) in the future. The near future.

Quotes...

"Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained"- William Blake"As a man thinketh in the heart, so is he"- Book of Proverbs, Chapter 23 Verse 7"For all things are in us psychically, and through this we are naturally capable of knowing all things, by exciting the powers and the images of wholes which we contain"- Proclus"The unexamined life is not worth living"- Socrates"I know that I hung, on a wind-rocked tree,nine whole nights, with a spear wounded,and to Odin offered, myself to myself;on that tree,of which no one knows from what root it springs."- Elder Edda"Less good there lies, than most believeIn ale for mortal men;For the more he drinks, the less does manOf his mind the mastery hold"

"A paltry man, and poor of mindAt all things ever mocks;For never he knows, what he ought to know,That he is not free from faults"

"The head alone knows, what dwells near the heart,A man knows his mind alone;No sickness is worse, to one who is wiseThan to lack the longed-for joy"- Hávamál"I look in your utmost self and see the universe not yet created."- Rumi"He who knows no life save the physical is merely ignorant; but he who declares physical life to all-important and elevates it to the position of supreme reality - such a one is ignorant of his own ignorance."- Manly Hall"The most peculiar thing is that this superstitious and insolent cult of work is proclaimed in an era in which the irreversible and relentless mechanisation eliminates from the main varieties of work whatever in them still had the character of quality, art, and the spontaneous unfoldment of a vocation, turning it into something inanimate and devoid of even an immanent meaning."- Julius Evola

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